Picture a giant billboard, half-filled with everything anyone says about you. Good, bad or ugly, it’s all up there for the world to see. Let’s also say you’re a rather public person, so a good portion of the commenters are haters or complainers.
If I told you that I’d sell you the other half for a monthly fee so you could refute the claims, what would you tell me? What you say eff off? Would you try to take down the billboard altogether?
Or would you shut up and pay the money?
Take that same concept and put it online. Pretty shitty, right?
It’s deplorable. It’s wrong.
Every one of these Squidoo-powered pages will rank very, very high when your name or company is search, so if you don’t control the left half of the page, you’re screwed.
It’s not what we should be doing. We should be helping companies. We should be assisting potential customers solve problems. We SHOULDN’T be using popularity or SEO power to extort money from companies with a public presence.
This isn’t adding anything, it’s taking away.
Screw you Seth Godin.
UPDATE (7:18am, 9/25): A few points directly from Godin:
-Only about brands are being experimented with
-Those who ask to be removed will be
-It’s all information that’s freely available at search.twitter.com
I still don’t like it. Not one bit. This was not what I expected from a marketing genius. No business should be forced to engage with their customers. They should just lose sales to someone that has.
EDIT (10:59am, 9/25): Looks like Godin uses his own product. Nice work, thanks for restoring the faith.
